Shane Richmond is Head of Technology (Editorial) for Telegraph Media Group. He first joined the Telegraph in 1998 and has been Online News Editor and Communities Editor. He writes about all kinds of technology but especially Apple, iOS, ebooks and ereaders, and digital media.

It's not just the BBC that prevents British newspapers putting up pay walls

In yesterday's Evening Standard, Emma Duncan, the deputy editor of the Economist, criticised "the insane notion that newspaper content should be provided for free on the internet".

She also argued, rather bizarrely, for the primacy of journalism's problems over everyone else's: "Journalism helps society to hold politicians to account; molecular biology, or hairdressing, or whatever it is you do, doesn't."

Yeah, take that molecular biologists! When was the last time you made the world a better place, eh?

I think she was joking. I hope she was. Indeed it's difficult to take the whole article seriously given that it's decorated, online at least, with a giant picture of Dita Von Teese's breasts and that Duncan follows her argument about newspapers with some thoughts on bra sizes.

The idea of newspapers withdrawing their content behind paywalls has taken on an air of inevitability in recent weeks as the industry becomes more squeezed. Rupert Murdoch declared last week: "The current days of the internet will soon be over." Carolyn McCall, the chief executive of Guardian Media Group, says she's exploring the idea of putting her newspaper's "specialist areas" behind a paywall and the New York Times is, according to the Independent, thinking of charging too.

I'm still not convinced by the arguments for pay walls and Duncan's case doesn't convince me any further. First of all she claims that readers will adjust to paying for journalism online because "they've been paying for it on paper for centuries". As Mike Masnick points out – in a blog post worth reading for its thorough dismantling of David Simon’s testimony to Congress last week – readers have never really paid for the journalism, at least not in broadsheets.

What I think she's saying is that readers have been used to paying something to receive the news in a convenient format. I would argue that if you take away the format, paper, then you take away the reason to pay.

Duncan hits on a crucial point when she says that free provision of news from the BBC undermines the ability of newspapers to charge. But she doesn't take it far enough. Her suggestion is to cut back the BBC but she doesn't consider that any free service will have the same effect. Once we've dealt with the BBC what do we do about Sky News? How does the Times compete with the Telegraph if they're behind a pay wall and we're not?

As Clay Shirky writes: "Not only is a news cartel unworkable, but that if one existed, [the] competitive advantage would be in attacking it rather than defending it."

There are other arguments against pay walls but I keep coming back to this one because I haven't yet seen an effective counter. If anyone knows of one, please let me know.